Buy the 27 cm square. Not because it is better made — at this price nothing is better made — but because a sheet of nori is 21 cm wide and 19 cm deep, and a 24 cm mat leaves you five centimetres of bamboo to finish the roll with. That is the whole size question. It has one…
Buy the tray that contains the dishes you already own, not the one that matches the number of people you feed. A Japanese tray is not a carrying device with a nice finish. It is the outer edge of one person’s meal, and its size was settled by what goes inside it several centuries before…
Japanese offices still teach tea service as a procedure, and the first instruction in it surprises people: do not put the cups on the saucers. Carry both on the tray, cups standing in a row and saucers stacked beside them. Set the tray down on a side table. Then lift each cup onto its saucer,…
A tin sake cup that holds 60 ml costs around $40 to $70, which is five to ten times what a perfectly good porcelain ochoko costs, and almost every page selling one carries the same sentence: tin softens sake. I went looking for where that sentence comes from. It comes from the people who make tin….
Buy the basket that fits the pot you already own. That is the decision, and it runs the opposite way from how the size charts read: the pot has to be 1–2 cm smaller in diameter than the seiro, because the rim of the pot is what carries the basket. A pot of the same…
If you are left-handed and you have been putting off buying a Japanese teapot because the left-handed ones seem to cost a fortune and never be in stock — half of that is wrong, and the wrong half is the price. At Ippodo, the Kyoto tea house, the Black Kyusu Teapot in Tokoname ware is…
Buy a jubako by the shelf it will live on, not by the number of people you plan to feed. The headcount printed on the listing is not a measurement — the same 6.5‑sun three‑tier box is sold as feeding three people, four, five and six, depending on who is writing the page. The width…
The slatted mat under a plate of cold soba is a spare part. In Japan it is stocked on its own, in fixed sizes — 16.5 cm and 19 cm — and usually sold two to a pack. Once you know that, the purchase reorganises itself: you are not buying a dish. You are buying a frame…
A kyūsu holds 200–350 ml. A yunomi holds 130–160 ml when it is a cup you drink roasted tea from. Do that division and the Japanese teapot most people own turns out to be a two-cup pot — one round, for one or two people, with a second brew coming in four minutes. That is…
The 18 cm ohitsu that Japanese kitchenware shops ship abroad is listed at 630 ml. Take a tape measure to the same container and the inside is about 15 cm across and 10 cm deep — a little under 1,800 ml. Neither figure is a typo. They are measuring two different things, and almost nobody selling the box in English…